THE BOOKER GOES TO.....

Anne Enright for The Gathering.

Enright won the Man Booker Prize, one of the literary world's most prestigious awards, for her bleak Irish family saga.

Congratulations are in order though deep down I was rooting for Mister Pip and The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Oh well, readers can't always be choosers, can they?

Though the bookmakers got it wrong too. William Hill, the British bookmaker which gives odds on the Booker Prize had put 'The Gathering' and Indra Sinha's 'Animal's People' at the rear of the field at a very long 8/1.

It wouldn't be the Booker, if it wasn't surprising us year after year and getting us to flip another page.

Nielsen's BookScan shows Enright's book has so far sold just 3,253 copies compared to Ian McEwan's 'On Chesil Beach' that leads the list with sales of 120,362.

Here's how the rest fared:
'Darkmans' by Nicola Barker- 11,097
'Mister Pip' by Lloyd Jones - 5,170
'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' by Mohsin Hamid - 4,425
'Animal's People' by Indra Sinha - 2,589

All that will undoubtedly change.

For the record, the Booker, which was founded in 1969, rewards the best novel of the year by a writer from Britain, Ireland or a Commonwealth country. And now it's Enright's turn to charm the literary world and tip the sales figures.

More on Enright here.